Indian Epics Tag

Do Indians have a sense of history? No is pretty much the received wisdom even today in major sections of the academia, media and the rest. If you as much as question the sources, the roots of this received wisdom, you are branded with the choicest of Leftist labels but that’s the least of our concerns. Before looking at a “sense of history” or “historical sense,” we need to look at how history is defined. Commonly accepted definitions include: A study of the human past. A field of research whichRead More

Introduction More than five years ago, Wendy Doniger bestowed a rather flippant interview in Outlook India on the eve of the release of her book, The Hindus: An Alternative History, the same book which Penguin (the publisher) later agreed to pulp when it was faced with legal action initiated by Dinanath Batra. The title sounds sufficiently pompous, entirely faithful to Wendy Doniger’s career as an Indologist. Aditi Banerjee responded with a comprehensive rejoinder that yet again reinforced Wendy’s suspect credentials as an honest scholar of Indology. Aditi’s almost line-by-line dissection of the interviewRead More

Read the previous parts: 1, 2, 3, and 4. Why shouldn’t we be outraged, why shouldn’t millions be outraged, when a woman writes a piece that’s based on factual errors, falsification, and selective reading about women that millions of Indians regard as role models? What exactly gives Nilanjana Roy the right to insult the icons and role models of other people based on her worldview of how women should be? If Nilanjana Roy for example, calls Surpanakha a wronged woman based on convenient and/or selective readings, I can in theRead More

Read the previous parts: 1, 2, and 3. So where were we? Popular discussion? Niyoga? No…well, yes, we were at the three princesses: Amba, Ambika and Ambalika. Pardon my confusion. I mean, confusion happens when Nilanjana Roy mixes up timelines. Imagine my plight: she begins with Sita, then moves to Draupadi. Correct: from Treta Yuga to Dwapara Yuga. Then she spends some time in Dwapara Yuga. Suddenly she reverts to Treta Yuga, she reverts to Shurpanakha. But does she stop there? No. Without warning, she drags in Hidimbi. ThatRead More

Read Parts 1 and 2. After trying to force-fit Draupadi into the feminist mould, Nilanjana Roy sets her sights on Amba, Ambika and Ambalika in yet another extremely revealing paragraph. Amba is, again, silenced in popular discussion, and yet her story remains both remarkable and disquieting — the woman who will even become a man in order to wreak revenge on the man who first abducts and then rejects her. There is nothing easy about her story, as anyone who has tried to rewrite the Mahabharata knows; or about theRead More

Is Draupadi Rarely Referenced? After failing to show how Sita’s abduction by Ravana and her abandonment by Rama qualify as “rape” and/or “sexual assault,” Nilanjana Roy turns to Draupadi whom she characterizes as follows: Draupadi’s story is rarely referenced, though it is powerfully told in the Mahabharata. Draupadi’s reaction, after Krishna rescues her from Dushasana’s assault while her husbands and clan elders sit by in passive silence, is not meek gratitude. She berates the men for their complicity and their refusal to defend her; instead of the shame visited onRead More

Introduction Nilanjana Roy’s Business Standard piece on Jan 08, 2013 entitled A woman alone in the forest is just the latest in what has become a much-lauded fad. A fad whose staple diet consists of a distorted reading of Indian epics, misinterpretations aplenty, sleights of hand, concealment, and open falsehood. We’ve seen the disastrous results of what happens when such untruths come to be accepted as truth—simply put, they multiply and over time gain such wide currency that even when the truth is pointed out, people simply dismiss it asRead More

I know, I know. The title of this post will only rile up Salil Tripathi further because he’s big on things like “tone,” and “civility,” which he cites are the reasons he doesn’t engage with me. Isn’t that a jolly way to wriggle out of an open invitation for debate? And poor me, despite being snubbed thus repeatedly, offered to take him up on his terms: of politeness, civility, and even asked him to set the terms of the debate. The constantly-travelling Londoner responded to this offer with…silence. There. SnubbedRead More

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So the Ramajanmabhoomi-Babri Masjid verdict has been postponed and it’s time yet again for doing what we’ve been known to do best: push problems as much as you can until they explode as they must. Meanwhile, the attitudes in the secular

Gautam Sen’s scathing piece in the Pioneer, reproduced in full because Pioneer’s links don’t work the next day. Dire and unnerving as the piece is, it is another wake up call, one among the thousands that we continue to ignore

A reader wrote to me with an experience that he says vexed him. The relevant portion of his email is excerpted below (with his permission via email): …during a talk with a liberal friend of mine, regarding the MF Hussain

First, credit where it is due: sincere thanks to my all-knowing Twitter friends Gopi and Ranganaathan for bringing this to my attention. Preface A certain Father Dominic Emmanuel seems to have taken it upon himself to educate the Honourable Justices

Head over to this great piece by Mukta Raut. …I have observed that of all the religious communities, Hindus are the most clueless about their religion. I went to a convent school. We had a Moral Science period where the

Here’s my next installment of the Neeti Shataka. The verses are in no specific order but they are kind of thematic: Bhartruhari talks about fools in these. The poet stretches the limits of exaggeration in two verses here if only

Several months have passed since I published anything on the venerable Bhartruhari. In this installment, I present one of my all-time favourites from Neeti Shataka. Nindantu neeti nipunah yadi vaa stunvantu | Lakshmiih samaavishatu gacchatu vaa yatheshtam || Adya eva

This BBC report barely manages to conceal its glee over a recent farce ceremony where “hundreds of Hindu Dalits” converted to Buddhism or Christianity. Dissecting the BBC’s sleazy reportage is not the focus of this post.